The idea that everything that happens in and to men’s cricket in this country somehow signifies the state of the nation is toxic. But sometimes it’s so satisfying – such as when broadcasters and marketers receive a fresh lesson about tough-talking campaigns that help mask poor foreign policy. (“Accounting” for 25 years of struggle on South African pitches? I know teenage male viewers are ditching Indian cricket broadcasts wholesale for European football, but pretending that ‘Team India’ is managed by Jose Mourinho isn’t going to keep them around.) Yet all it takes is one win for selfsatisfied murmurs of approval to rise, not because cricketers have done their job well, but for their participation in the theatrics of “aggression”, a word appropriated to describe the Bollywood- villain stares and temper tantrums that have become part of our on-field aesthetic.

Team India is not only dominant, but is seen to be so. This is how, some feel, Indians overcome historic centuries of subjugation, first by the colonialists and later by their good manners. Obviously, this would be a matter of profound emotion if every cricket match was played between Bhuvan Kisaan and Captain Russell. Since international cricket is not a year-round schedule of Lagaanre-runs, the conflation of Indian assertiveness with spitting, boyish petulance runs a little thin.

There are three things that specifically bother me about this attitude. One is its figurehead. I hate to bring up Virat Kohli, first because he makes Anushka Sharma smile, and second because he is surely as tired of being written about as I am of reading about him. Both his beautiful, disciplined style and the astonishing transformation of his work ethic are unique, and deserve their place in history.

Yet, the marketing of his temperament as one of bellicose machismo (the Delhi-style swearing, the round-eyed glares) contradicts both these aspects of his game, and has to be one of the most retrograde features of our cricket culture. Kohli, as captain, is not sui generis. He carries forward — or tries to, at any rate — the exuberance of Ganguly and the grittiness of Dhoni, both of which did reshape attitudes on field as well as in the stands.

So it’s a real mystery that it’s considered desirable for him to also be more loutish than either. It’s possible that the distinction it lends him pleases the people who manage branding opportunities for him, which brings me to the second problem. This love of posturing really captures what India’s Economic Survey, published this week, would call “the zeitgeist (or maahaul)”.

Upwardly mobile, Hindi-speaking north Indian men — the Mukkabaaz type, as we previously established — have fulfilled every sociologist’s dream in these last few years, seizing the political moment and throwing urbane Anglophones into tizzies of self-doubt. That’s fine, obviously; or at least, it is what it is. If this youth-bulgy demographic can keep governments in power, it can do anything it likes. But to characterise its rah-rah peacocking on the cricket field as subaltern assertion is disingenuous. This isn’t the overthrow of the brahminical austerities of an earlier generation: in its brittleness and entitlement, it can only ever be in continuity with them.

The third thing is something that I’m afraid may be a quality that really does define the “ugly Indian”, to use one editor’s shorthand: an illiterate disinterest in history as it affects people other than ourselves. Indians are far from the first people to escape the anxiety of the sahibs’ influence. It cannot have escaped anyone’s notice that the home team’s accounts with us go back only 25 years because it belonged to an apartheid state that once terrorised men like Lungi Ngidi and Kagiso Rabada. CLR James didn’t write Beyond A Boundarybecause he thought Frank Worrell was a dashing lad.

I write this not to dispute cricket’s long history of respectability politics, whether in its imperial avatar or its bourgeois one. To pretend that exposed molars and maa-behen-whatevers is what it takes to reverse the tide of history is pretty flippant, not to mention self-serving. Indian cricket has never been more entertaining or energetic. It’s also never been more powerful. This hostility kabuki that we now put out on the field and in press conferences is the product of both the first condition and the second. Fans may be tempted, now more than ever, to feel like we are ready for war on the cricket field — but let’s not lie to ourselves about what we’re fighting for.

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